kgaughan / sc

Geoff Eddy's sound changer, grabbed from archive.org with the docs changed to markdown.

Geoff's Sound Change Applier

Last update: 31 August 2010 (version 0.8)

Contents

• About SCA
• Rules and terminology
• Higher-level processing
• Command-line options
• Converting from older versions
• Sample rules

About SCA

Geoff's Sound Change Applier, SCA hereafter, is a program which applies rule-based transformations to strings of Unicode text. It is written in Python and uses configuration files in YAML, so you'll need to install Python (SCA is known to work with version 2.6, but probably won't with 3.x) and PyYAML to be able to use it.

SCA was originally written as an aid for linguists and conlangers to simulate the effects of the Neo-grammarian concept of sound-change and is accordingly oriented towards this use, although it should be usable for any similar non-linguistic task. You can, for example, very easily write L-systems in it. It was originally based on a C program written by Mark Rosenfelder, which is fine for what it does, but I needed something more powerful for my porpoises, which frequently require one word to be converted into several descendants simultaneously. I recommend reading the documentation for his program anyway, since although it works somewhat differently from mine, many of the underlying concepts and principles are the same.

For version 0.8, SCA has been completely redesigned and rewritten. It is not completely compatible with earlier versions; a section in this file explains what to do to convert .sc files which used to work.

Getting SCA

All of the necessary files are stored in this repository:

• SCAdefs.py SCAitem.py SCArule.py SCA.py SCApply.py: The Python implementation.
• SCAchars.yaml SCAdirparams.yaml SCAparams.yaml: The YAML configuration files. Don't edit these unless you are absolutely sure you have a good reason for doing so.
• SCAtest.py SCAtest.yaml: a test suite. You can safely ignore this, but you're still welcome to add tests to it.
• README.md: a copy of this file.
• spanish.sca: sample file with very approximate sound changes from Latin to Spanish. It is most definitely not guaranteed to be authoritative!
• ipa.sca: some definitions for use with IPA symbols.

Licensing and re-use

I can't guarantee that SCA will be suitable for your requirements, but if you use it and find it helpful, I'd love to know. I'd also be interested to hear about any suggestions you have for future improvements and any bugs which you may have found.

You may do what you like with SCA, free of charge, including using its code in something of your own; if you want to know how to do this, and can't figure it out from the code, just ask me for the details. I only ask that you credit me and link to this page if you use SCA for anything you publish, whether software or output: share and enjoy, don't steal credit for something you didn't create. Something like "Output generated by Geoff's SCA" will do fine.

Rules and terminology

SCA's behaviour is specified by a sequence of rules, which are typically stored in one or more text files and executed with the SCApply.py script. If you want to try the following examples out for yourself, type the rule into a file, save the file as "foo.sca", and run the script as follows:

python SCApply.py -q -cfoo <WORD>

where WORD is the example word; it can actually be several words, if you're feeling adventurous.

Basic replacements

The most basic rule simply replaces all occurrences of one piece of text with another, for example:

* a x _   ! banana -> bxnxnx

This rule consists of five elements, which are separated by white space:

• A dialect specifier. Ignore this for now.
• The text which needs to be changed. This is referred to as BEFORE hereafter.
• What BEFORE should be changed to; this is AFTER.
• The environment. This must contain an underscore; the text before this underscore is referred to as PRE, and the text after it is called POST. If both PRE and POST are empty, it means "everywhere".
• A comment. This consists of the exclamation mark and everything which follows it, and is ignored. Comments in the example rules in this document show what the effect of the rule will be.

Comments are optional; the other parts are mandatory. BEFORE and AFTER are together known as the change (better, perhaps, transformation, but that's longer to type).

PRE and POST may be used to restrict the change to occur before or after, or between, specific text; this models conditioned sound-changes in historical linguistics:

* a x b_   ! banana -> bxnana
* a x _n   ! banana -> bxnxna
* a x n_n  ! banana -> banxna

Note, however, the following:

* n x a_a   ! banana -> baxana

This does not give baxaxa - why? The answer is closely related to the banana problem, which asks, "how many occurrences of ana are there in banana? The problem is that there are either one or two, depending on whether you count overlapping occurrences or not. By default, SCA only considers nonoverlapping occurrences, but you can append a flag to a rule to make it consider overlapping ones as well:

* n x a_a B  ! banana -> baxaxa

Anything which follows the environment is ocnsidered to be a flag. Some other ones are F (for "first"), which performs the replacement once only starting from the beginning, and L (for "last"), which does the same from the end:

* a x _ F  ! banana -> bxnana
* a x _ L  ! banana -> bananx

There is also R, which does the same as B but starting from the end.

NOTE: Use at most one of BRFL. The results of combining them are not guaranteed.

Quantifiers

SCA supports the regular expression metacharacters . ? + * |, so you can write rules like:

* b|n x _  ! banana -> xaxaxa
* nc? x _  ! bananca -> baxaxa
* na* x _  ! bananaanta -> baxxxta
* na+ x _  ! bananaanta -> baxxnta
* b.n x _  ! bananabendy -> xanaxdy

BEFORE in these rules means respectively:

• b or n
• n, optionally followed by a c
• n, optionally followed by one or more a's
• n, followed by one or more a's
• b, followed by anything, followed by a

Generally speaking, though, it's better to avoid such explicit regular expressions in SCA; there are almost always better ways to specify what you want.

If you want to use a character with special meaning as itself, precede it with a backslash; this includes the backslash character itself:

* \+ plus _ ! 3+3 -> 3plus3
* \\ /  _ ! path\to\file -> path/to/file

Categories

Suppose you want to replace all vowels in a word with x. One way to do this is with the first rule:

* a x _

repeated five times, with a replaced successively by e i o u. But this is clearly inefficient; a better rule is:

* a|e|i|o|u x _

Still better, though, is to define a category:

vowel = aeiou
* <vowel> x _  ! facetious -> fxcxtxxxs

The first line defines the category vowel to consist of the letters aeiou; the second refers to it in BEFORE.

A category is an ordered list, so if you have categories in both BEFORE and AFTER, SCA will replace a character in the first category with the corresponding one in the second:

ustop = ptc
vstop = bdg
* <ustop> <vstop> _  ! reaction -> reagdion

You can also use categories in PRE and POST, so you can model Welsh-style intervocalic lenition of voiceless stops with:

vowel = aeiou
ustop = ptc
vstop = bdg
* <ustop> <vstop> <vowel>_<vowel>  ! tecos -> tegos

A category name should really consist only of letters and digits, must not start with a digit, and should not be all in uppercase. (Personally, I'd disallow digits completely.)

You can't use a category in AFTER to replace simple text in BEFORE, because there is no meaningful way to decide which value from the category to use, so you can't do this:

* h F _ ! ERROR!

More about categories

A category name can also be a single uppercase character, in which case the angle brackets are not needed to refer to it:

C = bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz
V = aeiou
* C x V_V ! ambitious -> ambixious

Categories can be extended, combined, and reduced in several ways. For example, in definitions:

cat1 = abc def  ! cat1 = "abcdef"
cat2 = cat1 ghi ! cat2 = "abcdefghi"
cat3 = ca t1    ! cat3 = "cat1"
A    = abc Def  ! A    = "abcDef"
B    = xyz      ! B    = "xyz"
C    = A g h i  ! C    = "abcDefghi"
D    = jkl      ! not allowed; "D" has previously been used as a symbol.
E    = AB       ! E    = "AB"; don't do this either.
F    = A B      ! F    = "abcxyz"; this is the correct way to do it.

And in references:

cat = abcdef
dog = ghijkl

<cat>         ! "abcdef", of course
<^cat>        ! Complementation; anything but "abcdef"
<cat+ghi>     ! Augmentation; "abcdefghi"
<cat-ace>     ! Subtraction; "bdf"
<+ghi>        ! One-off reference; "ghi"
<-ghi>        ! One-off complement; anything other than "ghi"
<cat,dog>     ! Combination; "abcdefghijkl"
<cat,dog+xyz> ! Combination; "abcdefghijklxyz"
<cat,dog-aei> ! Combination; "bcdfghjkl"

It is better to use these for one-offs only and define separate categories if you need to use them a lot.

In general, a string of letters in a category reference will be treated as the category definition if there is one, otherwise the letters themselves. Note, however, that if all contiguous letters in a reference are uppercase, they will be treated as categories; thus <AB> is the same as <A+B>.

SCA tries to be sensible when one category replaces another and there are different numbers of characters in the two categories, or if there are duplicate characters. If the category in BEFORE is longer, the extra characters are deleted; if the one in AFTER is longer, the extra charactres are simply ignored:

* <+abcde>  <+xyz>    _ ! debacle -> yxzl
* <+abc>    <+vwxyz>  _ ! debacle -> dewvxle

Duplicates in AFTER should not be surprising; duplicates in BEFORE ignore every occurrence except the first:

* <+abcde>  <+xxyyz>  _ ! debacle -> yzxxylz
* <+abbcde> <+xxyyzz> _ ! debacle -> zzxxylz

It's legal to use quantifiers with categories, thus, to remove sequences of x followed by one or more vowels, you'd do this:

* x<vowel>+ 0 _

Zeros in a category in AFTER will delete the corresponding characters in BEFORE:

* <+abcde>  <+x0y0z>  _ ! debacle -> zxylz

Finally, note this rather silly situation:

T = ptk
V = aeiou
* <TV> <VT> _

The rule is equivalent to:

* <+ptkaeiou> <aeiouptk> _

which probably won't do what you want.

Features

Features are an alternative way of looking at category replacements. They're an attempt to satisfy those who prefer the lower-level sort of sound-change rule which looks like this:

* [-voice] [+voice] V_V ! ata -> ada

A feature is defined as a pair of category-like definitions separated by a pipe. The first part of the pair specifies the characters which do not have the feature, and the second part specifies those which do, so that the meaning is "adding the feature to each character in the first part produces the corresponding character in the second part". There must be the same number of characters in each part. For example, voice could be defined as one of the following:

feature voice ustop ufric | vstop vfric
ptk f s h | b d g vz G

Features can't be defined in terms of other features, but they can be combined:

feature fric ustop vstop | ufric vfric ! define feature "fric"
[-voice,-fric] [+voice,+fric] V_V      ! kata -> kaza

Indexes, positions, and zero

The following definitions are assumed hereafter.

T = ptk
D = bdg
F = fθx
N = mn�
V = aeiou
L = lr
stop = T D

In a rule like:

* F Th _ ! fotografy -> photography

SCA is clever enough to know that T and F are both in the same position in their parts, so an F should be replaced with a T. The reverse will also work, so:

* Th F _ ! photography -> fotografy

However, this (hello, Sally Caves!) won't:

* F hT _ ! ERROR!

because there is nothing corresponding to the T. However, you can do this instead:

* F h<1T> _ ! fotografy -> hpotograhpy

Internally, BEFORE and AFTER are converted to a sequence of items; a category makes up a single item, as does any contiguous string of ordinary characters and regexp metacharacters. In AFTER in this rule, <1T> means "replace the first item in BEFORE with the corresponding T"; this is called a category mapping. Note that the angle brackets are mandatory here, regardless of the name of the category.

Digits can be used in AFTER to refer to items in BEFORE, so you can make two characters change places (metathesis) with:

* VL 21 _ ! tort -> trot

The digit 0 (zero) has the special meaning of "nothing". So you can get rid of characters you don't like by replacing them with zero:

* F 0 _ ! fusty -> uty

A more complicated example, which deletes anything between an N and a T, is:

* . 0 N_T ! nutmeg -> ntmg

This can also be written:

* N.T 13 _ ! nutmeg -> ntmg

Our problematic rule earlier can also be fixed with a zero to pad the rule out, although this is not recommended:

* 0F hT _ ! fotografy -> hpotograhpy

In general, if you have several ways of expressing the same rule, the choice depends on how you view the rule. For example, both the following do the same thing:

* etymology entomology _
* ty        nto       e_mology

but one views the change as replacing one complete string with another, while the other considers only the parts which actually change.

If you have zero on its own in BEFORE, you can create characters out of nothing (epenthesis):

* 0 p m_r ! amra -> ampra

This is more useful with blends, with which it can be generalised.

Strings and lists

A string is a sequence of characters which you would like to use more than once. For example, if you want to censor the string 'xenu' differently in different contexts, you can do this:

string foo xenu     ! define string 'foo'
* $foo$ xxxx _\.net ! www.xenu.net -> www.xxxx.net
* $foo$ yyyy _      ! "his name was xenu" -> "his name was yyyy"

A list is like a category, except that it is made up of strings rather than single characters:

list dips   ei,ai,oi,eu,au,ou  ! define list 'dips'
list single i,e,e,u,o,o        ! define list 'single'
* ~dips~ ~single~ _            ! reitainous -> ritenos

You can interpolate strings in lists, and replace lists and categories with each other:

list dips   ei,ai,oi,eu,au,ou
foo = uvwxyz
* ~dips~ <foo> _ ! daireitous -> dvrutzs
* <foo> ~dips~ _ ! vexedly -> aieoiedlau

Note, however, that this won't do what you might expect:

list dips   ei,ai,oi,eu,au,ou
* ~dips~ <+ieeoou> _ ! daireitous -> derits

This is because <ieeoou> is a category, not a list, and it ends up as ieou.

Referring to BEFORE, PRE, and POST

Suppose you want to reduce a sequence of two identical characters to one. Within SCA, the way to do this is to regard it as removing a character if it appears after itself, so we need a way of specifing that PRE is to be equal to BEFORE. The percent sign is interpreted in SCA as meaning BEFORE when it in PRE or POST:

* a 0 %_ ! bazaar -> bazar
* a 0 _% ! bazaar -> bazar, exactly the same

This will also work with strings and, more usefully, lists:

string foo xyz
list dips ei,ai,oi,eu,au,ou
* $foo$  0 %_ ! xyzxyz -> xyz
* ~dips~ 0 %_ ! raiain -> rain

The signs < and > can be used by themselves in AFTER to represent PRE and POST respectively; this models complete assimilation:

* N > _D ! android -> addroid
* D < N_ ! android -> annroid

And you can also use < in POST; thus to delete something which appears between two identical vowels:

* N 0 V_< ! canal -> caal

You can have other things in PRE and POST alongside the percent sign, although this is not yet guaranteed to work:

* a 0 _n% ! banana -> bnna

Anchors

The hash character in PRE means "the beginning of the text", and in POST it means "the end of the text". So you can remove a single final vowel with:

* V 0 _# ! racine -> racin

or several with:

* V+ 0 _# ! superbee -> superb

Similarly, to put an h before an initial vowel:

* 0 h #_V ! umour -> humour

Quite often, you need to indicate "initially or after a consonant"; this works as you might expect:

* h 0 #|<cons>_ ! heather -> eater

Blends

Blends are probably the trickiest part of SCA to understand, which is why they have been left to last.

A blend is a special type of category replacement in which the category and the index of the replacement character in the category come from different places, rather than taking them both from AFTER. It is specified as {cat:pos}, where cat specifies the category and pos the position. For example, in:

* N {1:>1} _T ! anpa -> ampa

the category comes from BEFORE and the position from POST; the effect is that the item in AFTER remains a nasal, but shifts position. In linguistic terms, this is regressive assimilation of the nasal to the following stop. If you switch the two parts of the blend, like this:

* N {>1:1} _T ! anpa -> atpa

the position stays the same, but the category changes instead. This is almost the same as this normal category replacement:

* N T _T ! anpa -> atpa

except that the replacement category comes from POST rather than being explicitly specified.

1 means "the first item in BEFORE", and >1 means "the first item in POST". Similarly, <1 means "the first item in PRE", and can be used to indicate progressive assimilation:

* N {1:<1} _T ! anpa -> anta
* N {<1:1} _T ! anpa -> anma

The indexes - 1 in all of these examples - can be omitted, in which case the item from which the category or position is taken is the corresponding item in the appropriate part. So, these four examples could also be written:

* NT {:2}2 _ ! anpa -> ampa
* NT {2:}2 _ ! anpa -> atpa
* NT 1{:1} _ ! anpa -> anta
* NT 1{1:} _ ! anpa -> anma

where the unspecified category indexes are taken to be 1 in the first two and 2 in the others.

Blends can also model epenthesis, with zero in BEFORE; you need either to have both PRE and POST in the blend:

* 0 {>:<} N_T ! amta -> ampta
* 0 {<:>} N_T ! amta -> amnta

or an explicit category in the category part:

* 0 {T:<} N_L ! anra -> antra
* 0 {T:>} L_N ! arna -> artna

Alternatively, if you prefer to keep your environments clean, you can do these instead:

* NL {T:1}   _ ! anra -> antra
* LN {T:2}   _ ! arna -> artna
* NT 1{2:1}2 _ ! amta -> ampta
* NT 1{1:2}2 _ ! amta -> amnta

When all else fails - temporary environments

Sometimes you just can't get a single rule to do what you want to; in this case, you'll probably need two or more rules and a bit of fiddling. For example, say you want to delete a h between two vowels, but not if the first is a and the second u. With a single rule, this is almost impossible. Instead, you can set up a temporary environment with an otherwise unused character:

* 0  ; Vh_V B ! tentatively mark each 'h'; note the banana flag
* ;  0 ah_u   ! remove the marker if necessary
* h; 0 _      ! and get rid of the remaining 'h's.

Quite often, you'll need a rule which removes stray characters after this kind of thing:

* ; 0 _ 

Higher-level processing

SCA has a number of ways to consider rules as more than just isolated items in a sequence. The principal mechanisms for this are directives and comments.

Comments

Actually, comments don't do anything; they're merely a way for you to annotate your files without interfering with SCA.

A comment may be specified in two ways. We've already seen the exclamation mark, which turns everything after itself into a comment if it's not at the start of a line. If you want an entire line to be a comment, put a hash character at the start. So:

* foo bar _ ! this is a comment
# so is this
!but this isn't - it's a directive and will cause an error
! nor is this
* foo bar _ # and nor is this; it looks like an anchor or a flag

Directives

A line which starts with an exclamation mark is a directive; it's an instruction to SCA to do something other than define a rule, category, or whatever. For example:

• !end tells SCA not to read any more input. This takes precedence over aanything else.
• !skip tells SCA to ignore all further input lines until further notice.
• !noskip undoes all preceding !skips, which do not nest.

These are provided for convenience and not as part of a cpp-like preprocessor; I really hope nobody's files get that complicated anyway.

Mnay directives take parameters, which are given as !param=value; some parameters have no value and are given as just param. For example:

• !include file=FILE will read in the contents of FILE before proceeding with the current file. You will be warned about recursive includes, so don't try it.

Other directives will be introduced as appropriate.

You can specify that the value of a parameter may be supplied on the command-line (q.v.). Two directives which can only work this way are:

• !skipif COND: like !skip, but only if COND is defined on the command-line with -DCOND
• !skipunless COND: similarly, but only if it is not defined.

Groups and randomisation

Rules can be grouped into larger entities with the !group directive; !endgroup signals the end of the group. By itself this isn't very useful, but with the appropriate parameters you can add a bit of non-determinism to your processing:

• times=N will execute the group exactly N times.
• shuffle will randomly reorder the rules in the group before applying them, once per iteration.
• max=N will process the first N rules in the group; this is useful in conjunction with shuffle.
• pick=N is equivalent to shuffle max=N, and will apply N random rules out of the group.
• prob=N will execute the entire group only if a random number between 0 and 100 is less than N.
• ruleprob=N is similar, but the probability applies to each individual rule within the group.
• reduce=N can be used to decrease the values of prob and ruleprob after each iteration; for example, reduce=50 will halve them each time.
• seed=string will seed the random numbers with string. If string equals time, the system clock will be used instead, which should ensure that the random numbers are unpredictable. If string is word, the default settings are used (see below).

You can apply random probabilities to individual rules by expressing the probability as a percentage flag:

* x 0 _ 50 ! get rid of the x's half of the time

And you can select random values from categories:

* x <@vowel> _ ! change x's to random vowels

By default, the random numbers are seeded each time with the next word to be processed, or with the recently-processed word for the group-based parameters. This effectively means that rules with percentages will affect the some words each time, which is hopefully a good simuation of incomplete sound change.

Persistence

A special group consists of the persistent rules, which are specified with the P flag. These rules are all applied, in the order in which they are defined, after each non-persistent rule; for example:

* x 0 _ P ! ensure that we never have any x's

Dialects

A dialect is a path through the sequence of rules. Its name derives, of course, from SCA's original application in simulating historical linguistic development.

Dialects are identified by single letters or digits; by default you get the one dialect A. All dialects to which your file applies must be specified at the top of the file with the !dialect directive; thus !dialect AB C D declares that you have four dialects called A B C D. You can then declare that a rule applies to certain dialects only, thus:

A...  ~ai,au~  <+EO>   _   ! dialect 'A' collapses diphthongs
.B..  <ustop>  <vstop> V_V ! dialect 'B' does lenition
..C.  V        <@V>        ! dialect 'C' mangles vowels

The dots aren't necessary, but are convenient for lining up the text neatly.

To save you having to type out the same dialect specifier in front of several lines in succession, you can use the !dirprefix directive. The value of its dialects parameter is prepended to each line:

!dirprefix dialects=A
# some rules for dialect 'A'
!dirprefix dialects=B
# some rules for dialect 'B'
!dirprefix dialects=
# now need actual dialect specs again
AB foo bar baz_quux

Exceptions

Occasionally you want a rule to ignore a specific word. This is done in SCA through the mechanism of exceptions, which should not be confused with the exceptions which programming languages throw when something goes wrong.

To specify an exception to a rule, you need to do two things: identify the rule, and say which combinations of dialects and words it doesn't apply to. For example:

!exception rule=FOO words=sanctus dialects=ABC
*  c   0   n_t    _   @FOO

Here the @FOO flag gives the name FOO to the rule, and the !exception directive says that in dialects A B C the word sanctus wil be left alone.

As well as specifying exceptions in the file, you can put then in a file of their own called FILE, which can be read in with the !exceptfile file=FILE directive. This file must be in the following format for each combination of rule and dialect:

@RULE dialects
words words words
words words
words

Referring to previous rules and parts

If the backquote character ` appears in BEFORE, AFTER, or the environment, the part is taken from the previous rule:

A..  s   z   V_V   ! voicing
.B.  `   h   `     ! lenition
..C  `   t   `     ! rhotacism

Equivalently, you can name the first rule and refer to it explicitly:

A..  s     z V_V   @FOO
.B.  `@FOO h `@FOO
..C  `@FOO t `@FOO

You can also name specific changes and environments, and use them later:

change lenition     <ustop> <vstop>
env    intervocalic V_V

.B. `lenition `intervocalic

Note that the first definition here defines both BEFORE and AFTER; there isn't a lot of point defining just one.

Headings

A heading is a comment which is echoed back to the user if requested. There are three levels of headings:

!heading Top-level processing
!subheading not so important stuff
!subsubheading incidentals

For displaying headings in the output, see the -L command-line option.

Assertions

Assertions allow you to test whether a rule gives the output you expect. By default they are ignored; you can tell SCA to take notice of them with the -A command-line option.

You can specify an assertion with the !assert directive, which applies to the most recently-defined rule:

A t d a_e
!assert dialect=A word=ate result=ade
!assert dialect=B word=rate result=rate

The parameters are hopefully self-explanatory. If an assertion fails, i.e. if applying the rule to word does not give result in dialect, SCA will warn and exit.

L-systems

Because SCA does list replacements in parallel, lists are ideal for implementing the rules of an L-system. Here, for example, is how to produce ten generations of Lindenmayer's original L-system:

list predecessor a,b
list successor   ab,a

!group times=10
L ~predecessor~ ~successor~ _
!endgroup

No doubt, SCA could also specify a workable implementation of John Horton Conway's Game of Life. This is left as an exercise for the reader.

Command-line options

We've seen some command-line options already; here's the complete list. Every argument has a short form, which is a single letter, and a long form, which is one or more words; the short form is preceded by a hyphen, and the long one by two:

• -X or --option simply turns option X on;
• -Xvalue, -X value, or --option=value supplies value with the option.

All of the options which SCA understands are specified in the file SCAparams.yaml, so you can change them if you really need to.

Miscellaneous options

• -cFILE or --scfile=FILE: tell SCA which sound-change file to use. Note that this option is actually mandatory. If FILE does not end in .sca, this suffix will be appended automatically.
• -xFILE or --excfile=FILE: load exceptions from FILE. This has the same effect as the !exceptfile directive at the start of the sound-change file.
• -i or --showdefs: show everything which is defined and exit.
• -dDIALECTS or --dialects=DIALECTS: process the words through DIALECTS. By default, all defined dialects are used.
• -eENC or --encoding=ENC: use encoding ENC for input and output. The default is utf-8.
• -SSTRING or --seed=STRING: set the random number seed to STRING; this is the same as the !seed directive.
• -A or --doassert: run in assertion mode.

Definitions

A definition is a name-value pair which can be passed to SCA and referred to in the parameter list of a directive. A definition is specified with -DNAME=VALUE or-define=NAME=VALUE; the value may be absent, in which case the equals sign is not needed and SCA is only interested in whether NAME is defined.

You can refer to the definition with &NAME:DEFAULT; it is not wise not to supply a default. For example:

!group times=&times:5
... rules ...
!endgroup

This will process the group five times by default, but you can specify a different number of iterations with -Dtimes=42.

Output to the screen

By default, SCA will print its output to the screen preceded by a banner and some information about how many things are defined. Each input word is preceded by ">" followed by the outcome in each dialect on the following lines. The following options affect the style of this display:

• -q or --quiet: don't show the banner or counts.
• -v or --verbose: show each rule as it's compiled.
• -m or --minimal: just show the output words; this overrides everything below.
• -r or --rules: display each rule which changes the word as text.
• -R or --regexp: display each rule which changes the word as a regular expression; this is useful to see what's happening behind the scenes.
• -a or --all: when used with -r or -R, shows all rules whether they make a change or not.
• -C or --colour: add colour to the output; this requires an ANSI-compatible terminal.
• -n or --showlines: show the line number on which the rule was defined.
• -LN or --level=N: when used with -r or -R, displays headings, plus subheadings if N is 1 or greater, and subsubheadings if it is 2 or greater.

Input files

SCA can read words from a file and process them in hopefully useful ways.

The file is specified with -lFILE or --lexfile=FILE, as in Mark R's program. If no other options are given, SCA will split each line in FILE on whitespace and process every one of the resulting words. The -FSEP or --insep=SEP option specifies an alternative separator, such as a comma for .csv files.

If you don't want to process all words on a line, use the -fFIELDS or --fields=FIELDS option. Here FIELDS is a comma-separated list of numbers and ranges, for example 1,3-5 for fields 1 3 4 5, or 2 for just one field. Note that the numbering starts at zero.

Test files

The -tFILE or --testfile=FILE option is especially interesting. It expects an input file in a strict format, in which the first line is treated as a header; one field in the header must contain the word in, and each of the others must specify a dialect such as A; optionally, one field may contain out. On each subsequent line, the word in the field headed in is processed in each of the dialects specified in the other fields in the header, and the results are compared to the corresponding fields in the line; all differences are reported, with the test in the out field (if present) output to facilitate identification.

For example, if you're investigating Romance diachronics, you might use a test file like this:

in     out   P     E     F     I
únus   one   um    uno   un    uno
duó    two   dois  dos   deux  due
trés   three tres  tres  trois tre

Output files

By default, the output from processing an input file goes to the screen. There is a little magic built into SCA to send it to a file instead.

You can specify the output file name with -oFILE or --outfile=FILE. By default the output is written in fixed-width columns of width 15; you can change the width with -wN or --width=N, or supply an output separator C with -sC or --sep-C.

What now happens is that each input line is written to the output, and for each field specified with -f (all fields by default), the results of processing the word in that field through the specified dialects are appended to the input line. If you supply the -H or --header option, the first line in the input file is treated as a header and is not processed; the extra columns are identified with the respective dialects. Obviously, you won't want too many input words on each line when doing this.

Converting from older versions

If you have a .sc file from version 0.6 of the older SCA, you can convert it to a .sca file which will work with version 0.8 with the help of the following.

Now directives

The following features should be convered to directives:

• #: #:: #::: -> !heading !subheading !subsubheading
• SKIP NOSKIP END -> !skip !noskip !end
• SKIP IF COND -> !skipif cond=COND
• SKIP UNLESS COND -> !skipunless cond=COND
• Include = FILE -> !include file=FILE
• dialects = DIALECTS -> !dialects DIALECTS
• exceptions = FILE -> !exceptfile file=FILE
• except = ID WORDS -> !exception rule=ID dialects=DIALECTS word=WORD, once for each WORD in WORDS
• assert = DIAL WORD RESULT -> !assert dialect=DIAL word=WORD result=RESULT
• conditions -> now on the command-line with -D

The following are no longer supported:

• ``; use a single ` in each part instead.
• The <<cat>> category specification now needs single angle brackets.

The % on the end of a percentage is no longer required, and will probably cause an error. Similarly, references to individual items within BEFORE no longer need a hash character.

Finally, mappings are sufficently different to require individual attention. A mapping like {1AB} can probably be converted to <1B>, and those like {>} can hopefullybe left alone, but it's difficult to generalise otherwise.

Sample rules

For fun, here are some rules which implement well-known sound changes.

Palatalisation of velars

For example, in Slavic or Romance.

velar   = kgxɣ
palatal = ʧʤ��
front   = iíîeéê
* <velar>j <1palatal> _        ! rakja -> raʧa
* <velar>  <palatal>  _<front> ! raki -> raʧi

* Kj C _  ! very concise alternative

Hungarian-style vowel harmony

First of all:

front = eøy
back  = aou

If the harmony is dictated by the first vowel in the word:

* <front> <back>  <back>.*_  B
* <back>  <front> <front>.*_ B

If it's dictated by the last vowel in the word, we need a reverse banana (and you were wondering what the point of that was, weren't you?):

* <front> <back>  _.*<back>  R
* <back>  <front> _.*<front> R

i-umlaut

Using the categories previously defined:

<back>   <front>   _<cons>+<+jiíî>

Sievers' Law

This causes front vowels to appear before glides which follow heavy syllables:

C  = (consonants)
G  = wj
hi = ui
V  = (all vowels)
á¾»  = (long vowels)

* CG 1{2hi}2   #|C|á¾»|VV|h_V B 

See if you can work out why you can't use zero in BEFORE here.